Most Americans believe that the U.S. economy will fully recover from this recent recession and will soon become stronger than ever.  But that is definitely not what is happening.  The truth is that the very foundations of the U.S. economy are coming apart and we are headed for a massive amount of financial trouble as a nation.  Collectively, the U.S. government, U.S. businesses and U.S. consumers have piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world.  This mountain of debt has enabled us to enjoy a spectacular standard of living for the past several decades, but now the bills are coming due and nobody seems to even realize how great of a financial disaster the U.S. now finds itself in the middle of.

The following are 10 huge flashing danger signs that show just how much of a mess the U.S. economy is in....

#1) The FDIC is opening a satellite office in the Chicago area that will accommodate up to 500 temporary staffers and contractors to manage receiverships and liquidate assets from what they are expecting will be a massive wave of failed Midwest banks.

#2) The U.S. Treasury Department announced on Tuesday that foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities fell by $53 billion in December, which is the biggest one month decline in history.  China alone reduced its holdings of U.S. Treasuries by $34.2 billion.  So if foreigners quite buying up all of our debt, what happens then?

#3) Mortgage defaults in the U.S. have continued to hit record highs and housing prices are continuing to fall.  Now, a massive "second wave" of adjustable rate mortgages is scheduled to reset beginning in 2010.  The first wave of adjustable rate mortgage resets absolutely devastated the U.S. housing market in 2007 and 2008.  So what is this second wave of mortgage resets going to do to the U.S. economy?

#4) In fact, one new study estimates that five million houses and condominiums will go through foreclosure over the next few years.  Needless to say, that would be absolutely catastrophic.

#5) The number of Americans who are declaring bankruptcy continues to skyrocket.  1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

#6) But how can Americans pay their bills without jobs?  In some areas of the United States it is now nearly impossible to get a really good job unless you have an inside connection.  In fact, the mayor of Detroit estimates that the real unemployment rate in his city is approximately 45 to 50 percent. 

#7) America needs jobs, but soaring unemployment insurance taxes are discouraging small and mid-size companies from bringing on more workers.  According to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, companies in at least 35 states will have to fork over even more in unemployment insurance taxes in 2010.  Making it more costly to hire a new worker is not going to help put Americans back to work. 

#8) The U.S. economy is facing a pension crisis of unprecedented magnitude.  The truth is that the vast majority of all pension funds in the United States, both public and private, are extremely underfunded.  With millions upon millions of Baby Boomers now at retirement age, there is simply no way that all of these unfunded pension obligations can be met.  Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Chicago and Joshua D. Rauh of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management recently calculated the collective unfunded pension liability for all 50 U.S. states for Forbes magazine.  So what was the total that they came up with?  3.2 trillion dollars.

#9) Not only that, but the Social Security system is also a silent monster that threatens to devastate U.S. government finances.  In fact, many analysts are now forecasting that the coming wave of Baby Boomers is going to bankrupt the entire Social Security system.

#10) All of these economic problems come at a time when the U.S. national debt is exploding into the stratosphere.  The national debt is now over 12 trillion dollars and it is rising at a rate of about 3.8 billion dollars per day.  So how much is one trillion dollars?  Well, if you spent one dollar every single second of every single day, it would take you over 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.  That is a lot of money.

The truth is that the U.S. is drowning in debt.  American consumers are broke.  American businesses are broke.  State governments are broke.  The U.S. federal government is broke.  The only way that we can keep things going is to borrow increasingly larger amounts of money.

But when we do borrow even more money we make our long-term problems even worse.

The day of reckoning for the U.S. economy is fast approaching and we are headed for some extremely difficult economic times.

Are you ready?

The majority of Republicans now believe that Barack Obama is a socialist. According to a new survey conducted for Daily Kos by polling firm Research 2000, 63 percent of those who identify themselves as Republicans say that they believe that Barack Obama is a socialist. Of course the liberal blogs are having a field day with this one. After all, it is ludicrous to think that any major U.S. politician is actually a socialist, right?

Well, where I come from if it walks like a duck and if it quacks like a duck then we call it a duck.

So is Barack Obama a socialist?

-Obama believes that the government should run the economy and he has already taken over some of America's biggest corporations and has given government bailouts to many of the biggest banks.

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-Obama believes in big government and he is expanding the number of people working for the U.S. government to over 2 million people this year.

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-Obama believe in raising taxes and in massively increasing government spending.

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-Obama has almost got his government takeover of the U.S. health care system pushed through Congress.

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-Obama is pushing a "cap and trade" carbon tax scheme on the American people that would give the U.S. government unprecedented control over U.S. businesses and over the intimate details of our personal lives.

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-Among Obama's mentors during his formative years were some of the most radical socialists and communists in recent U.S. history.

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-Obama is continuing to build the Big Brother police state infrastructure that other administrations started which is stripping away our civil liberties and turning us into whimpering servants of the almighty central government.  This is exactly what other major totalitarian socialist governments throughout history have done.

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If you study history, the parallels between what is going on right now in the United States and what happened during the rise of other socialist regimes throughout history is absolutely stunning.

The truth is that the America that we all grew up in is systematically being dismantled.  Once it is gone it will almost be impossible to get back.  We encourage you to visit our new blog entitled The End Of The American Dream where we will be exploring the destruction of the American ideal and how this is going to impact all of us in the years ahead.

On July 30th, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 2749 - The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009. This bill, the centerpiece of big agriculture's war on organic farming in the United States, gives the U.S. government such unprecedented control over independent and organic farmers that some are calling this proposed law "fascism on the farm".

H.R. 2749 has been given this very deceptive name: "The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009", but the reality is that it has very little to do with food safety. Instead, concerns about food safety are being manipulated by big agriculture to push through a law that will devastate their smaller competitors.

You see, every major case of food contamination in recent U.S. history has come from large-scale industrial agriculture - not from small farms.

But who will this new law hurt the most?

Small independent and organic farmers.

In fact, these proposed new regulations are so overwhelming and so draconian that they will even discourage people from growing family gardens in their own backyards.

The reality is that this bill is an effort by the big agricultural corporations who control 90% of the food production in the United States to crush their remaining competition. The losers in all of this will be the American consumers who will have fewer and less healthy food choices.

You can find the full text of the bill here:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-2749

The following are just a few of the ridiculous provisions in H.R. 2749.....

-H.R. 2749 mandates that an annual registration fee of 500 dollars be imposed on any "facility" that holds, processes, or manufactures food.  For the major corporations this is nothing, but on a smaller farmer this is a very substantial charge.

-H.R. 2749 gives the FDA absolute power to regulate how crops are raised and harvested.  In other words, even our small and organic farmers will now be forced to farm exactly how the federal government tells them to.  So under this bill many organic farming methods will be banned as "unsafe", farmers may be forced to use GMO animal feed, they may have to shoot their animals up with unsafe drugs and hormones, and they may be forced to use petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides.  It will all depend on what the federal government defines as "safe" farming. 

-H.R. 2749 will give FDA the power to impose a quarantine on a specific geographic area.  This would even include "prohibiting or restricting the movement of food or of any vehicle being used or that has been used to transport or hold such food within the geographic area."  Stopping the movement of all food basically means imposing martial law.  Should the FDA have the power to impose martial law?

-H.R. 2749 would even give the FDA the power to conduct warrantless searches of the business records of small independent and organic farmers, even if there has been no evidence at all that a law has been broken.  Of course nobody in Congress even reads the bills they pass anymore, so they probably don't even know that this law violates the United States Constitution.

-H.R. 2749 also would impose draconian criminal and civil penalties.  How draconian?  Prison terms of up to 10 years and/or fines of up to $100,000 for each violation.  So just one could destroy a small farmer and put him or her out of business forever.

In addition, this new bill would impose on small farmers massive amounts of paperwork and administrative burdens that the big corporations can handle but they can't.

You see, that is how you put a horde of small competitors out of business - you get the government to pile on the rules and burdens and regulations until they collapse.

That is why Monsanto desperately wants this bill to become law. They hate the small farms and they want to take them out of the picture.

Why in the world do you THINK Monsanto is so in favor of this bill?

Why would Monsanto WANT more regulations placed on them?

Why?

Because it would give them a radical competitive advantage.

This bill would be another huge step towards corporations such as Monsanto gaining a stranglehold on the food supply of the United States.

This bill is a direct assault on the independence and security of American family farms and small organic growers.

Any member of Congress that supports this bill should be voted out of office in the next election.

No exceptions.

Please contact your Senators and tell them that you DO NOT support this bill.  If this bill is not stopped it will change farming in America forever.

There has been one member of Congress that has been willing to stand up to the Federal Reserve more than any other, and now that it has been revealed that Barack Obama's "financial reform" plan would give the Federal Reserve almost dictatorial power over the U.S. economy, Ron Paul is hopping mad.

On MSNBC the other day, Ron Paul was not shy about telling the nation that the U.S. government should not be handing massive new powers to the institution most responsible for creating this current financial mess.  In fact, Ron Paul told MSNBC that he believes that the Federal Reserve is already more powerful than Congress.....

"The regulations should be on the Federal Reserve. We should have transparency of the Federal Reserve. They can create trillions of dollars to bail out their friends, and we don’t even have any transparency of this. They’re more powerful than the Congress."

The truth is that the Federal Reserve is about as "federal" as Federal Express is.  The Federal Reserve is a private bank that is designed to maximize profits for the elite international central bankers that own it. 

The most frightening thing is that they are accountable to nobody.  Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have reinforced this point repeatedly in media interviews and in front of Congress.

In fact, when Congress asked the Fed where all the bailout money went, the Fed told Congress that they did not have to answer.

And now Obama wants to give them massive new powers?

Obama's plan would give the Federal Reserve unprecedented regulatory power over virtually every sector of the U.S. economy, and would allow the U.S. government, in conjunction with the Fed, to take over any company they want if they feel that there is "a threat" to the financial system. 

Ron Paul understands that the Federal Reserve is at the very heart of America's financial problems.  During the same MSNBC interview, he diagnosed the current situation brilliantly.....

“Too much regulations to begin with, so they give it more. The Federal Reserve creates the problem, so we give them more power. It’s fiat money that’s the problem, so we allow them to double the money supply - you can’t solve the problems that way. That’s like saying you can take care of a drug addict by just giving them more drugs."

Below you can see the entire interview.  It is probably one of the best Ron Paul interviews that has appeared on the mainstream news.....

But now even other members of Congress are starting to speak out against the Federal Reserve.  Senator Chris Dodd recently said that giving the Federal Reserve more power is like rewarding a son with a "bigger, faster car right after he crashed the family station wagon".

But Timothy Geithner, who ran the New York Federal Reserve until he became Treasury Secretary, is vigorously defending the plan to give huge new power to the Fed, and is arguing that the Fed will not need any oversight as they exercise these new powers as it is "very important" that the Federal Reserve "preserve its independence".

In other words, the Federal Reserve wants almost total control over the entire U.S. economy, but wants to be accountable to absolutely nobody.

Does that sound like a good plan to you?

That is why it is so important to support Ron Paul's bill to audit the Federal Reserve (H.R. 1207).  The Federal Reserve Transparency Act, as it is called, now has over 200 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, and recently it was reported that it will move out of committee to be debated by the full House of Representatives.  However, a similar bill is reportedly being severely watered down in the U.S. Senate.

The fact is that the Federal Reserve needs to be audited.  If Ron Paul's bill passes, the private bank that creates and regulates all U.S. currency will be forced by law to open its books for the first time since 1950.

That is almost 60 years ago.

It is time for the American people to learn what is going on at the financial institution that controls all of our economic lives, and it is time for the American people to learn what happened to all of the trillions in bailout money.

But the Federal Reserve will not let this happen without a fight.  They have vast resources and tremendous power at their disposal, and they aren't going to let someone like Ron Paul upset their apple cart so easily.

Let us hope that Ron Paul is victorious in this fight so that the American people can finally get a true idea of what his really going on at the Federal Reserve.

Is the United States facing a total financial collapse in this generation? Is the mighty American dollar about to be crushed by cold economic reality?

The truth may just be a lot more frightening than you ever imagined.

The reality is that any major currency not backed by gold in the history of the world has eventually failed, and the actions currently being taken by the U.S government and the Federal Reserve are speeding up the day when the dollar will totally collapse as well.

Sometimes words are not enough to describe a really bad situation. Hopefully the chart at the top of this article will give you get an idea of what is happening to the dollar. This chart originally comes from the Federal Reserve itself. The chart shows the U.S. monetary base from 1960 until today. From 1960 until about 1980, the amount of currency in circulation was increasing, but it was fairly stable. From 1980 to the middle of this decade, the amount of currency in circulation just exploded, but the worst news is found at the end of the chart.

If you look at what is happening today, the amount of dollars in circulation is absolutely shooting through the roof.  At this point, much of the cash which the U.S. government and the Fed have injected into the economy has not yet gotten into the hands of the person on the street, so the U.S. is still experiencing the beginnings of a deflationary depression. But eventually all of the money they have injected will get out there into the general economy.

When that happens, there will be a whole lot more dollars in circulation than before but about the same number of goods and services. Do you know what happens when that situation exists?

Inflation.

The reality is that because of what the U.S. government and the Fed are doing to the dollar, we are going to be facing rip-roaring inflation of a kind that Americans have never known.

And it will effect everyone.

For example, maybe you make good money now, but how far will your paycheck stretch when a loaf of bread costs ten dollars?

Perhaps you have spent decades sticking money in a bank account for retirement. Well, the cold hard truth is that inflation acts like a massive tax. When you wake up and your bank account only buys half of what it could buy the year before, how will you feel?

There is no other way for this current economic situation to play out.

The U.S. government and the Fed decided to spend their way out of this current economic crisis by cranking up the debt spiral one more time and by devaluing the dollar.

So America will see massive inflation - it is just a matter of how soon it will hit and how bad it will be.

What should you do?

Buy what you are going to need (food and supplies) right now while your dollars still have some value. Your dollars are never going to be more valuable than they are right now.

If you are trusting in a big bank account to be your security blanket in the future then you are going to be very disappointed as the dollar crumbles and your riches quickly fade.

You see, the U.S. government has settled on a policy of massive government borrowing and spending to try to turn the economy around.

This policy will have two general effects.

#1) There will be a short-term boost to the U.S. economy.  Some analysts will call it a recovery.  But this will only last for a while.

#2) The long-term economic problems will be made much worse by all this borrowing.  It was all the debt that caused this mess in the first place and now the U.S. government has multiplied the eventual economic disaster that America will face.  The dollar is going to drop dramatically in value and inflation is going to fly through the roof.

It took the U.S. many years to get to this point, but instead of learning lessons from the past, the U.S. government has decided that the only economic solution is to press the debt pedal all the way to the floor.

Barack Obama recently had his first budget passed by the Senate, and it is a monster. Obama's budget was only trimmed down slightly to a whopping 3.5 trillion dollars, and it contains an astonishing $1.2 trillion dollar projected federal deficit that would be the largest in history by far.

The era of big government was definitely back under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Now we are entering the era of REALLY REALLY big government.

The following were some highlights from Obama's budget proposal.....

*A tax increase on Americans making more than $250,000 a year, but tax cuts for those making less than that.

*A 634 billion dollar first step toward a universal health care system.

*Despite America's deep economic crisis, Obama is seeking to double U.S. foreign aid to other countries.

*Obama's budget proposal also included a new "global warming" tax. It would be the biggest tax increase in American history, and it would hit consumers with considerably higher utility bills.

*The Pentagon budget would get a 4 percent boost - to $534 billion next year.

Will all of this massive government spending fix the economy?

Well, it will help in the short term - just like going out and spending a thousand dollars on your credit cards will help you feel better in the short term too.

But what would happen to you personally if you went out and ran all your credit cards up to their maximum?

Financial disaster.

And that is exactly what is happening to the United States government now.

The reality is that the United States is now well over 10 TRILLION dollars in debt.

10,000,000,000,000 dollars in debt!

Will the current generation of Americans ever repay that?

No, the current generation seems determined to go much deeper into debt.

So, that means that Americans are dumping this debt on to their children and their grandchildren and to generations beyond that.

How immoral is that?

What America has done is they have sold their children and grandchildren into economic slavery forever. How would you feel if you were a little child and you discovered that your parents had left you with a debt that you could never, ever repay and that you would be making interest payments on for the rest of your life?

America's children and grandchildren will ALL be working all of their lives to pay interest on this ridiculous debt. Their labor will go into serving the owners of this debt, and there is no escape.

The goal should be to pass on a better world to America's children. How immoral is it to pass on such a debt to future generations?

Imagine if your parents came up to you and handed you a million dollar credit card bill that they had racked up and that was now in your name and you had to make payments on for the rest of your life?

America has had the greatest party of all time and has fueled the party on massive amounts of debt, but there is bad news.....

The party is almost over.

The reserves of America's local banks are gone. The financial institutions have borrowed an insane amount of money from the Federal Reserve this year just to stay afloat. America's financial system has never experienced a crisis of this magnitude in modern times.

The biggest debt bubble in the history of the world is starting to burst.

For decades Americans have lived like kings and queens.....enjoying the biggest party the world has ever known.....but financed with ever increasing amounts of debt.

Once upon a time, the United States was the biggest creditor in the world. But those days are long gone. Now America is the biggest debtor nation to ever exist on the earth.

America was the richest nation in the world, but that was never enough. Americans always had to have a bigger car, a bigger house and an endless supply of "stuff". So the American government piled up debt, American companies gorged on debt, and Americans made using credit cards into a national pastime.

If you include the future liabilities that America's government has already committed to such as future Social Security and Medicare payments, then the total debt of the federal government is over 65 TRILLION dollars.

65 TRILLION dollars!

Now that many of America's jobs have gone overseas, the price of gasoline is shooting through the roof, and tons of people are losing their homes, do we find that Americans are learning their lesson?

No.

Instead Americans are squeezing everything they can out of their credit cards. Total credit card debt in America is now over 790 billion dollars, and it is increasing at a rate which is four times faster than earlier this decade.

Instead of showing restraint, Americans have jammed the accelerator to the floor.

And did you know that Americans actually have a NEGATIVE savings rate?

Do you know the last time when that happened?

The Great Depression.

Prices are increasing dramatically while wages are not. Jobs are being outsourced and factories are being closed. America's largest banks and financial institutions are teetering on the brink of failure. Homes are being foreclosed at record rates. Personal bankruptcies recently hit an all-time high. And what is the answer that the politicians give America? Wasting even more money and getting us into even more debt.

America is truly reaping what they have sowed.

The Scriptures talk about those who would hoard wealth in the last days. Instead of feeding the poor and taking care of those who couldn't take care of themselves, Americans spent their money on mini-mansions, luxury SUVs and as much entertainment as they could pack into our lives. Now Americans will suffer the consequences just as the Scriptures say in James 5:1-5.....

"Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter."